David Sirota on why workers aren’t quite as ecstatic as the pundits think they should be:

As I noted last week, media pundits like Sam Donaldson simply cannot understand why polls show the public is so down on the economic direction of our country. These commentators - who are supposed to reflect the true pulse of America - look at today’s Wall Street Journal headline blaring that “Corporate Pretax Profits Jump 14.4% - Strongest Gain Since 1992″ and wonder: why, oh dear god why, aren’t ordinary Americans aren’t jumping with joy?

The answer, as I note in my upcoming book Hostile Takeover, is simple: if you take the five seconds it takes to actually look at the underlying data, you see that those profits aren’t actually benefitting ordinary workers - they are increasingly benefitting only those at the very top of the economic ladder. The Journal notes that “Corporate profits accounted for 11.6% of gross domestic product in the fourth quarter — the biggest share of the nation’s income companies have taken since 1966.” In other words, the amount being pocketed by corporations - as opposed to being shared with their employees - is the highest its been in 40 years - a situation we already knew was occuring thanks to earlier stats showing workers wages are stagnating.

How has this happened? “[Companies] have been able to [create this inequality], say economists, by sharing less with their workers,” says the Journal. “It highlights the increased power of corporate America versus labor,” says Paul Kasriel, chief economist at Northern Trust Corp. in Chicago. “That is a reflection of the global competition that labor now faces in America.”

That last phrase, of course, is a nice, business-suite tested euphemism for “American workers now have to compete with slave labor in developing countries thanks to their bought-off politicians happily passing one corporate-written free trade agreement after another.”